sábado, 23 de enero de 2016

"The dialectical view insists that persistence and equilibrium are not the natural state of things but require explanation, which must be sought in the actions of the opposing forces . . . The opposing forces are seen as contradictory in the sense that each taken separately would have opposite effects, and their joint action may be different from the result of either acting alone . . . The relations among the stabilising and destabilising processes become themselves the objects of interests, and the original object is seen as a system, a network of positive and negative feedbacks."Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist. Harvard University Press.

jueves, 21 de enero de 2016

Seed company mergers have been all over the news lately. First, there was Monsanto’s rebuffed attempts to buy Syngenta, followed by a proposed merger between DuPont and Dow. Then, a Chinese company expressed interest in buying Syngenta, which lead to Syngenta’s renewed interest by Monsanto. As this chart
by Michigan State University’s Phillip Howard shows, all this recent
merger activity is the culmination of about two decades of the world’s
largest seed companies swallowing up smaller companies by the score.

And while most of these developments have been reported as business
stories, they also have huge implications for agriculture and our food
supply.

Yes, these mergers would have big economic ramifications. For example, as I’ve noted,
the growing economic power of seed companies, and the gene and crop
patents they own, often keep farmers from being able to save seeds. This
allows the companies to jack up prices, which results in a higher
percentage of farmer profits going to seed purchases than before and
lowers profit margins per acre for farmers. This trend puts upward
pressure on farm size, which often contributes to simplified farming
practices that lead to environmental harm.

But lost in the legitimate concerns about economics, have been the
implications of mega seed companies when it comes to the impact of
climate change on farming.

The Threat of Climate Change and the Need for Crop Diversity

Climate change is a well-recognized threat to crop production, and
research has shown that it is probably already reducing the productivity
of some major crops.
Increased temperatures and droughts cut productivity, as do extreme
precipitation events and floods, causing possible increased pest
invasions, and harm to important crop helpers like pollinators.

How we grow and breed our crops can either make them more climate
resilient or more vulnerable. And one key element of resilience against
climate change is crop genetic diversity. Sadly, when large industrial
agriculture companies exert their influence, diversity is generally
reduced. That means fewer types of crops and less genetic diversity
within each crop.

And a seed company landscape made up of fewer, larger companies will likely make this problem worse.

These mergers would also probably lead to a reduction in research. As Brett Bergemann, Monsanto’s Chief Operating Officer, has said,
“The crop chemicals industry is bound to consolidate because target
companies are spending too much on research and development for new
products.” Meanwhile, commercial farming has become increasingly dependent on private sector research to develop potentially useful traits.

Recent research
supports the increased climate resilience of diverse cropping systems
that rely on agroecology, like using long crop rotations, cover crops,
manures and mulches, intercropping, perennial plants, and so forth.
Yields averaged seven and 22 percent higher for corn and soybeans,
respectively, grown in more diverse crop rotations under hot and dry conditions. Greater drought tolerance has also been observed with increased varieties of a single crop in Ethiopia.

Large seed companies aren’t the only factors driving U.S. farms to
become less diverse; the demands made by food retailers and processors
and our nation’s farm policies also play a large role. But they’re a big
piece of the puzzle.

These seed companies put most of their breeding efforts into a small
number of major crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton, which increases
their economic competitiveness compared to other crops. Recent research published in PLOS One
found that cropping systems are becoming simpler especially in places
like the U.S. Midwest, where these major crops are particularly
dominant. The researchers attributed this trend to be in part due to the
concentrated seed industry.

Many of the crops that have been replaced around the world by corn and soybeans are more climate-resilient. For example, sorghum, millet,
pigeon peas, and cassava are generally more heat and drought tolerant.
As the big seed companies grow, and push their varieties on
international markets, they may further displace local crops.

And the big seed companies also foster poor generic diversity within
the crops that they favor. For example, National Academy of Sciences
member and internationally respected geneticist and corn breeder Major Goodman noted at a summit about crop breeding
in 2014 that the big companies rely heavily on just a few basic types
of corn, to which they add a few additional traits. Meanwhile, the much
more genetically diverse native varieties of maize—and its wild relative
and progenitor, teosinte (which can supply even more adaptive traits to
corn)—are being lost from their regions of origin in Mexico and
Guatemala.

It is much more expensive to produce many diverse locally adapted
varieties, and more time-consuming. So big seed companies generally
narrow their focus to reduce costs. The more the seed and breeding
industries and communities become concentrated in a few mega-companies,
the more these harmful trends will be exacerbated. But we’re reducing
our adaptability just at the moment when we will need it the most.

Small Farmers Hold the Key

By contrast, small farms, and especially indigenous farmers who are
under pressure from companies and governments around the world, are the
keepers of the types of genetic diversity that we will all need to
continue to adapt to a changing climate. They have developed, nurtured,
conserved, and traded these diverse local crop varieties for millennia.
In fact, they should be celebrated and supported for doing the original
crowdsourcing, or “seed-sourcing.”

But all is not lost. As researchers Maywa Montenegro and Dianne Rocheleau
pointed out in their recent papers, the loss of small and peasant farms
has slowed in recent years in some areas, sometimes through active
resistance. In fact, many of these farmers continue to plant diverse
crops and varieties.

However, we cannot be complacent about the vitality of the stewards
of our genetic inheritance. Big seed companies and the high-profit crop
varieties that they favor, will continue to displace or absorb small and
peasant farms into a system that sees them primarily as potential
customers.

We need to actively support small farms and their communities through
public policies, and public participatory breeding without patents,
such as the work of the Open Source Seed Initiative,
while opposing further seed company mergers and patents that prevent
seed saving. Our future ability to produce the food we need in the face
of climate change depends upon it.

martes, 5 de enero de 2016

The Green Revolution (GR) is sometimes portrayed as a set of
humanitarian programmes, organised by philanthropic foundations, which
applied northern expertise to the problem of hunger and poverty in the
global South. Several historians of the GR have qualified this view,
noting that although the GR’s consequences may have been
humanitarian – in that it succeeded in boosting food production and
reducing the need for grain imports – the actual motivation
behind the programmes, as John Perkins demonstrated, was a geopolitical
one. Namely, during the 1950s and ‘60s hungry Asian peasants were
thought to be susceptible to the charms of communism. In this piece,
however, I will argue that this geopolitical interpretation does not go
far enough in challenging the view that the reduction of hunger –
whatever the motive – was a central concern of the GR’s planners and
funders. Recent work on the GR in India by Corinna R. Unger and by Kapil
Subramanian suggests that historians (including me) have not paid
enough attention to the fact that GR programmes were not even designed to maximise food production.

As various development historians have shown, in the 1950s it was
common among modernisation theorists to regard peasant agriculture as
‘static’ and’traditional’, thus resistant to economic change.
Development programmes, therefore, needed to do more than merely
introduce new technology and institutions; they would have to bring
about a shift in mentality. To that end, as Nick Cullather has shown,
development experts were particularly keen on innovations which would
not just improve agricultural production but would yield spectacular
results quickly. The resulting shock – among farmers and government
officials alike – was thought necessary to undermine longstanding values
and assumptions. And the point of triggering this psychological
‘reawakening’ was to induce among peasants the desire to do more than
just feed their families better but to gain cash-income through
increasing efficiency and producing primarily for the market. Unger
reports one Rockefeller Foundation official enthusing in 1969 that
India’s peasants were ‘breaking out of centuries-old patterns of
subsistence agriculture and entering the new world of commercial food
production….’. Given this aim, the targetting strategy of the GR’s
planners made sense. They set up programmes to distribute improved seed,
fertiliser and pesticide only in ‘promising’ regions where water was
plentiful, growing conditions were good, and farmers were keen on new
technology. This, they reckoned, would maximise the likelihood of
producing the most dramatic yield-gains.

A major drawback of this strategy, however, was that while it boosted
production in the selected areas, it did not maximise overall
food-production (and was accordingly controversial among Indian
experts). For example, as Subramanian shows, the Indian irrigation
bureaucracy’s longstanding strategy was to maximise the area served by
public systems since this was thought to be not only socially equitable
but would also maximise production. But in the 1960s David Hopper, the
Ford Foundation’s agricultural economist in New Delhi, while conceding
that the bureaucracy’s strategy was indeed the optimum way to maximise production, instead advocated concentrating irrigation on ‘progressive’ areas because this would maximise profit for the favoured few.

The situation with fertiliser was similar. Indian agricultural
economists had calculated that the overall effect upon production would
be greater if fertiliser were distributed widely in small amounts
(because Indian tall wheat varieties were more responsive to low doses
of fertiliser than were the high-yielding dwarf varieties promoted by
the GR). The GR’s proponents, however, insisted that available supplies
of fertiliser should be concentrated on the favoured areas so that very
high doses of fertiliser could be used there, and yields would be
maximised. Finally, we need to ask why GR breeding-programmes focused on
some crops rather than others. Although rice (along with white millet)
was much more widely grown (and consumed, especially in rural areas)
than wheat in 1960s India and had been accordingly favoured by
agricultural policy there during the 1950s, from the mid-1960s GR
programmes devoted more resources to wheat- than to rice-improvement. (A
comparable crop-bias had earlier characterised the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Program.) Boosting aggregate food
production was evidently less important to the GR’s champions – despite
the existence of widespread rural hunger – than producing spectacular
yield-increases on a relatively small number of farms.

Many years ago Gavin Williams made a similar case for the World
Bank’s development aid to small farmers during the 1970s; its main aim
was not to enable them to grow more food but to encourage production for
the market. Moreover the tension between these two aims is much older.
As Harro Maat and other historians of colonial agriculture have shown in
recent years, although colonial authorities usually promoted the
growing of cash crops for the international market, peasant farmers
often resisted, growing subsistence food crops for themselves and
sometimes for sale on local markets. Have things changed since then?
According to Rajeev Patel, the team carrying out a Gates
Foundation-funded project for the African Enterprise Challenge Fund
reported that a central problem they faced was that most farmers there
‘viewed agriculture as a way of life and not a business’. For the
foundations, it appears, the profitability of small farms remains more
important than the amount of food they produce.

Jonathan Harwood is emeritus professor at the University of
Manchester and visiting professor in the Centre for History of Science,
Technology & Medicine at Kings College London. His most recent book
is Europe’s Green Revolution and Others Since (Routledge 2012) and his current work focuses upon the role of expertise in twentieth century agricultural revolutions.

"None of the human faculties should be excluded from scientific activity. The depths of intuition, a sure awareness of the present, mathematical profundity, physical exactitude, the heights of creative reason and sharpness of understanding, together with a versatile and ardent imagination and a loving delight in the world of the senses, they are all essential for a lively and productive apprehension of the moment." J. W. Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Ecology has been eminently a descriptive science despite some pioneering work by theoreticians such as Lotka, Volterra, Nicholson, and others. Description is a first step toward understanding a system. However, such a first step needs to be accompanied by the development of a theoretical framework in order to achieve real insight and, whenever possible, predictive power.

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"The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence". -Mahatma Gandhi

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“If our means of investigation became more and more incisive, we would discover the simple under the complex, then the complex under the simple, then again the simple under the complex, and so on, without being able to predict which state would ultimately prevail”Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 –1912)